Summer 2019 Morsels & Tidbits
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VOLUMEVOLUME XVI, XXXV, NUMBER NUMBER 4 3 FALL SUMMER 2000 2019 Quarterly Publication of the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor Eastern Europe, West of the Alleghenies Immigrant Foods of Steel Country, Part 1 Photo: Library of Congress LC‐USZ62‐56634 Children make their way to school in Homestead, PA, on July 5, 1907, with houses and steel mills in background. REPAST VOLUME XXXV, NUMBER 3 SUMMER 2019 MORSELS & TIDBITS Curated by Elizabeth A. Williams, “Gorham Silver: Prof. of History), who spoke to CHAA in 2014 and 2018, is part Designing Brilliance 1850–1970” is running at the Museum of of the Editorial Collective that took over the editing of the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) from May 3 Gastronomica this year. to December 1, 2019 and will later travel to the Cincinnati Art Museum and The Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC). This museum “Food at the Univ. of Michigan: Then and Now” was a has the largest collection of ware from the Gorham Mfg. seminar for first-year UM students last Fall semester, taught by Company, which was established in Providence in 1831, and Anthropology Lecturer Lisa Young. The course is described in rose to become the largest silver company in the world. Creating an article by Emily Buckler, “From Page to Plate: Uncovering everything from commissioned presentation pieces to show- Food History through Primary Source Documents”, in the 2019 stoppers for the dining room, it put uniquely American design on issue of the UM Library’s magazine, The Connector. To uncover the international stage. historical trends in eating at UM, the class used archival materials from the UM Bentley Historical Library and the Janice Bluestein On June 9, CHAA member Dr. Margaret Carney (Director Longone Culinary Archive (UM Library Special Collections), of the International Museum of Dinnerware Design) gave a new ranging from cookbooks more than 100 years old to fraternity and and improved version of her talk about Well of the Sea (1948- sorority banquet menus. A cooking team led by UM Dining Chef 1972) to the Culinary Historians of Chicago— appropriately de Cuisine John Merucci recreated an array of the dishes for enough, since the acclaimed seafood restaurant was located in consumption by the class and by other students at South Quad one Chicago. Dr. Miranda Brown (UM Prof. of Chinese Studies), evening in early October. Examples included chicken fricassee who gave a talk, “Of Cheese and Curds in China”, to CHAA last with mashed potatoes and a side of pineapple salad. January, has a research article in the Summer 2019 issue of the journal Gastronomica (19:2), “Mr. Song’s Cheeses: Southern Using archival collections from throughout Canada’s China, 1368-1644”. Dr. Helen Zoe Veit (Michigan State Univ. Maritime provinces, Lyn Bennett (Dalhousie Univ.), Edith Snook (Univ. of New Brunswick), and a team of research assistants have compiled published and manuscript recipes from before 1800 to create a searchable Early Modern Maritime Recipes Database (https://emmr.lib.unb.ca). The entries include digitized images of the original recipes, transcriptions, ISSN 1552-8863 explanatory notes, and essays. The recipes are largely the works Published quarterly by the of English-speaking men, but some are in French, German, or Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor (CHAA) Latin, and a number were recorded or compiled by English- speaking women. Submissions of additional recipes http://culinaryhistoriansannarbor.org/ are encouraged. An archive is available at https://cooks.aadl.org/cooks/repast The UK publisher Bloomsbury, which inaugurated the Editor……………….…….…..……Randy K. Schwartz journal Global Food History in 2014, is now launching a CHAA President…………Mariam Van Deventer Breed monograph series focusing on food from the late 18th Century to CHAA Program Chair...……………Laura Green Gillis the present. The series highlights the nutritional, social, political, CHAA Treasurer………..…………..……Dan Longone cultural, and economic transformations of food around the globe. CHAA Membership Secretary ……….Marionette Cano The editors are committed to publishing manuscripts that feature CHAA Website Editor…..………………….Judy Steeh geographical areas currently underrepresented in English- CHAA Founder and Honorary President…Jan Longone language publications, particularly Africa and Asia. For more information, contact the series editors, Amy Bentley of New York Univ. ([email protected]) and Peter Scholliers of Vrije The material contained in this publication is copyrighted. Universiteit Brussel ([email protected]). Passages may be copied or quoted provided that the source is credited. For submissions or inquiries about Repast, contact: Upcoming food history conferences: Sep. 2-6, 2019: “A Feast of the Senses: European Food and Randy K. Schwartz History 18-20th Centuries”, in Albi, Tarn, France. Organized 1044 Greenhills Drive by the International Commission for Research into European Ann Arbor, MI 48105-2722 tel. 734-662-5040 Food History (ICREFH). [email protected] Oct. 18-19, 2019: “At the Medieval Table: Cooking, Cultures & Customs”, at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). Subscriptions are $20/year. To subscribe to Repast or to Organized by Rutgers and by Mens et Mensa: Society for the become a CHAA member (which includes a subscription), Study of Food in the Middle Ages. contact either President Mariam Breed (tel. 734-320-3708) Nov. 15-16, 2019: “(Post)Colonial Foodways: Creating, or Membership Secretary Marionette Cano (e-mail Negotiating, and Resisting Transnational Food Systems”, the [email protected]), or download a sixth annual Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food, membership form from the web address given near the top at the Aula of the Univ. of Amsterdam. Organized by the of this box. university’s Special Collections Library. 2 REPAST VOLUME XXXV, NUMBER 3 SUMMER 2019 SESQUICENTENNIAL OF THE HEINZ COMPANY Our focus on immigrant foods of Steel Country is inspired, in part, by this year’s 150th anniversary of Henry J. Heinz’s first food-packing business, which he started in Sharpsburg, PA, near Pittsburgh. The year 2019 is also the 175th anniversary of Heinz’s birth, the 150th anniversary of his marriage, and the 100th anniversary of his death. Henry John Heinz was born near Pittsburgh to parents who had emigrated from Germany. (Interestingly, his father, John Henry Heinz, from the village of Kallstadt, was a second cousin of fellow Kallstadt immigrant Friedrich Trump, paternal grandfather of President Trump.) Henry’s mother, Anna, kept a household garden beside the brickyard in Sharpsburg that her husband John managed for a living. Henry was reportedly as young as 8 years old when he began to ply the streets of Sharpsburg selling surplus produce from the garden and developing a list of customers. At age 12 he began to use a horse-drawn wagon for the burgeoning business, and at 25 he Henry John Heinz and his wife, Sarah Sloan Young (“Sallie”) Heinz. and a partner formally launched a commercial line of canned and Image: http://www.johnheinzlegacy.org. bottled foods, starting with pickled horseradish. By the 1890s the H. J. Heinz Company was already marketing products overseas, and by the 1910s it had more than 20 processing plants in the U.S. The “57 Varieties” that made Heinz world-famous included several types of olives like those being bottled in the photo at right. In 1909 Elizabeth Butler, a pioneering Progressive Movement social investigator who studied the Heinz facilities and other canning factories in Pittsburgh, wrote that the task of pickle-bottler was one of the most physically demanding and lowest-paid jobs there. It was typically filled by young Slavic women whose families had immigrated to the region from urban areas in Europe. A 12-hour workday was standard in U.S. industry at the time. Butler went on to observe: Bottling pickles requires the highest dexterity. Blue- gowned, white-capped girls sit at long tables in rows transferring pickles from bowls to squat, thick glass bottles that signify vinegar and preserves to the mind of the retail customer. Each girl holds in her right hand a grooved stick which she thrusts into the bottle, then with her left hand she starts the pickle along the groove to the precise spot which, according to the model, it must occupy. The model jar shows how every pickle is to be placed. Bottles of olives and pickled cucumbers are planned to economize space, and bottles of mixed pickles are so arranged that each bit of color will be just right to make a harmonious whole. After the bottles are filled, they are inspected and compared with the model. The quick, sure touch with which the bottling girls follow the pattern and manage their tools is not learned in a day’s apprenticeship, but must be acquired by continued practice (quotation and photo from Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, Women and the Trades: Pittsburgh, Lewis W. Hine 1907-1908, Vol. 1 from The Pittsburgh Survey [New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1909], pp. 35, 41). Bottling olives in Pittsburgh. 3 REPAST VOLUME XXXV, NUMBER 3 SUMMER 2019 But today’s nostalgia for such cherished dishes should not obscure the challenge that immigrant families faced putting food on the table in Pittsburgh’s industrial districts in the early 20th FEEDING THE FAMILY Century. In 1907-8, the Russell Sage Foundation from New York City undertook a milestone sociological study in southwestern Pennsylvania, sending a team of trained IN HOMESTEAD, PENN.: investigators into the region to document the living conditions that workers faced. Known as The Pittsburgh Survey, these N VERVIEW FROM efforts resulted in the publication of a series of articles in A O Collier’s Magazine in 1908-9 and then a set of books between 1909 and 1914. One, Homestead: The Households of a Mill THE PITTSBURGH Town (1910), focused exclusively on daily living conditions in the community dominated by the Homestead Steel works, by 1907 one of the largest industrial plants of the United States SURVEY, 1907-8 Steel Corporation.